Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Roberto Fariñas, so exultant from the start, started losing vehemence in his speech. Conde knew that process and prepared himself for the true revelation.

  “The other problem,” he said, getting back on track after a pause during which he anxiously caressed the elegant gold watch soldered to his wrist, “the real problem, is that he thought that while I was in prison I could rat him out as Mejías’s possible killer … That’s why he left Cuba, not out of fear over Pepe Manuel’s whole story. And that’s also why he never wrote to me later. Shame wouldn’t let him. He thought something of me that he had no right to think … That was the real weight that moron carried until the end, and since he could never relieve himself of it, his body dragged it into the tomb.”

  Elias stayed silent, trapped by the shame genetically handed down to him, but at the same time relieved by Roberto Fariñas’s conviction that his father had not killed Mejías. Conde, in his role as silent witness, shifted uncomfortably, needled by the questions that had him in agony and the ones that, in his condition as a listener, he had to keep under control. He increasingly had the feeling that something in Fariñas’s tale didn’t match up.

  “I understand why Daniel thought that way,” Roberto continued his monologue. “At the time, many people who thought they could withstand it all broke. Fear and torture have survived for centuries because they’ve proven their effectiveness. And he had the right to feel fear, even fear of my ability to resist … Because sometimes, when the only thing you want is to stop feeling pain, to have the hope of surviving, you’re capable of saying anything to put an end to the suffering. But if I’m proud of anything in my life, it’s that I was able to resist that time. I was afraid, very afraid. Luckily, they didn’t really torture me … They hit me a few times, but I immediately realized that they were doing it with the brakes on. The sons of bitches didn’t want to leave any marks on me. And I figured that if they only left me standing or seated for hours, without letting me sleep, I was going to fall apart physically but I could resist psychologically. So I didn’t say a word: nothing about how Daniel and I had gotten Pepe Manuel out, and far less still, of course, about what your father had considered doing and what I knew he hadn’t done.”

  “I’m really sorry.” Elias finally managed to express his apology and made an attempt to change the direction of the conversation. “So, if it wasn’t my father, who could have killed Mejías?”

  “Anyone,” Roberto Fariñas let out his conclusion. “Mejías had spent twenty years fucking over and conning people. He could have even been killed by one of Batista’s men if they found out what he was doing with the passports and the revolutionaries.”

  “But you don’t have any idea?”

  “I do, but it’s just a suspicion. What I am sure of is that your father didn’t do it.”

  Conde felt the gears in his mind speeding up, and he supposed the same was happening in Elias Kaminsky’s brain. A “suspicion,” as Fariñas would call it, would logically have a name. That of a person who, in almost all certainty, must already be dead, like nearly all of those involved in that story. Why wouldn’t Fariñas provide Elias that relief?

  At the back of his storehouse of policeman’s intuition, dusty but still there, Conde felt another light going on, with greater intensity. What didn’t make sense about Fariñas’s speech, he thought, had to be the lie on which he had placed the truth on display: the man said he had a suspicion but didn’t want to say it, which was either petty or false.

  “Do you know that the Rembrandt painting that was at Mejías’s house came up for auction in London?” Elias asked him.

  Roberto Fariñas reacted with genuine surprise.

  “The Golden Painting of Discord…” he murmured as if disappointed. “No, I didn’t know.”

  “And, based on what I know, my father didn’t take it out of Cuba. He never got it back because he didn’t kill Mejías, as you yourself say, and, of course, he never again entered that man’s house. Almost all of Mejías’s family left Cuba in 1959 … Did they take it out of here?”

  “When they killed Mejías, there was a stolen painting. From the beginning, I thought that the Rembrandt we saw at Mejías’s house could be fake, and I was convinced that was so when I saw that they didn’t talk much about the robbery. Mejías’s people, his wife, and I think two or three daughters, left at the very beginning of the revolution, so it could be that they took the authentic painting, the one that your grandparents brought.” Fariñas was trying to find alternatives, and Conde, forced to remain silent, was convinced that something was screeching all the more forcefully. But he was still unable to make out what link in that story was causing the friction, until the implosion in his mind started to prove stronger than his agreed-upon nonintervention policy. The key was to peel off the truths from the trunk of a lie. He was going to earn his salary.

  “It wasn’t easy for those people to get that painting out of Cuba,” Conde suddenly interrupted, trying to contain his vehemence. “You know that. They would search them head to toe … Couldn’t they have left it with someone? Couldn’t it have been confiscated and then stolen by someone here?”

  Roberto Fariñas was listening to Conde but looking at Elias.

  “Did you have to bring this guy along?” he asked Kaminsky, pointing at the former policeman as if he were a repellent bug.

  “He’s helping me…”

  “Here in Cuba, to make a buck, they’ll sell you the nails from the cross and a couple of Rembrandt paintings … Helping you what, kid?”

  Even though he knew he was going over the line, Conde decided to rise to the attack, since he sensed that it could lead him to a path by which he could arrive at the truth and because he felt his dignity was wounded. He thought about it for a moment: he knew Fariñas would be hard to break, but he had to do it.

  “You were one of the ones who knew that that painting, the real one, was worth a lot of money, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course … But what in the hell are you insinuating?”

  “I’m not insinuating anything. Just confirming something. You knew it … and who else?”

  “What do I know?! Mejías was a charlatan. Anyone could have known it. He strutted around, showing off that he had an authentic Rembrandt, and the painting was in the living room of his house, for all to see…”

  “Not as far as we can surmise. What was there had to have been a copy, as you yourself say. Like the other paintings. Because while it’s true that Mejías was a charlatan, he wasn’t a moron. So the mystery as to why no one talked about the stolen painting can be explained because it wasn’t authentic and the family wasn’t interested in the painting being mentioned, not the fake one or the real one, because they had the real one…”

  “Yeah, okay, so what?”

  “What do you mean ‘So what?’?” Conde thought about it again. Did he have the right to keep going? He told himself, yes: the right was conferred by the need to get at the truth. “That you’ve been retired for twenty years. That you were removed from power a long time ago. But keeping up this house, buying all the shit you have, being the Papi of that woman who could be your granddaughter … With what money, Fariñas? What connections did your family have so that you emerged perfectly alive and wagging your tail from a place where other revolutionaries emerged without eyes, without fingernails … or dead? Was Mejías really the friend of one of your brothers? Or might he not be your buddy in things like the sale of passports and other matters like that? And now, and right now … what connections do you have to be able to buy yourself all of these things?”

  The owner of the spectacular apartment and beneficiary of the kindness of the overwhelming Chanel lady seemed to have lost his ability to speak before that ruthless barrage. Conde took advantage of the muteness that overtook Fariñas to launch into his petty demolition. Elias Kaminsky, on his part, looked like a modern version of Lot’s damned wife.

  “Daniel had reasons to be afraid of you. He knew you could rat him out.
That’s why he left and never wrote to you again. That’s why Daniel never returned to Cuba, not even when Batista and his people left. If he never told Elias his suspicions, it’s because he preferred to blame himself before revealing any doubts he had about you and your friendship. That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised if you and the original painting had some kind of connection…”

  Roberto Fariñas managed to get a second wind, only to protest.

  “What in the hell is this idiot talking about?” he said, referring to Conde but addressing Elias.

  Conde looked at Fariñas’s seventy-eight-year-old biceps, inches more muscular than his own, and decided to take the risk.

  “I’m talking about you having some connection with the Rembrandt painting, perhaps with that painting having appeared in London for auction just after Daniel and Marta died, and, perhaps, about you having some connection with Mejías’s death … Because not even Marta knew what day Daniel was going to kill him, and she always suspected that he could have killed him. But you did know everything, so much, that you’re convinced that it wasn’t Daniel who killed Mejías … And at the same time you let Marta live with her doubts until the end … So what about the date of José Manuel’s death? Did he really kill himself accidentally the same day that they killed Mejías or was the thing about the date some kind of cover-up all of you put together? Wasn’t it that José Manuel took the lead and killed Mejías and then took the ferry? Or was it you, who was running around with a gun, who was interested in the Rembrandt painting, and who had the balls to slit the throat and cut the dick off of some guy, or fire two shots at him, as you almost surely did in 1958? Besides, didn’t you yourself tell Daniel that you were willing to do whatever had to be done?”

  Fariñas had been going red in the face as his blood pressure went up. Conde, throwing punches in all directions, had managed to take him to the edge of the ring where he needed him. If Roberto Fariñas had anything left, it was his love for his own self-image, both physical and moral. So now he couldn’t do anything but defend it in front of the man who was the son of one of his best friends, the witness by proxy to his past.

  “Enough already, dammit!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know a fucking thing about that shitty painting! What I have here, including the woman inside, I have and I keep thanks to the jewels my family left me that I’ve been selling for years. I wasn’t one of those morons who handed over his jewelry to the government because they were saying it was the revolutionary thing to do. I had already given enough, I risked my own skin, yes, with a gun in my hand, and I killed a couple of son-of-a-bitch torturers and laid down bombs right under the police … And I’m selling those jewels because, before I die, I am going to spend it all on eating well and fucking well, until Viagra makes me explode like a glutton … All of this shit you’re saying about Pepe Manuel is just that … shit, shit, shit.” Roberto Fariñas’s diatribe seemed to get stuck in shit and, to extract it, he looked to Elias, leaving Conde out of his range of focus and more or less in that pile of feces. “Kid, I would have never ratted out your father. And he knew that. He left Cuba because he was afraid, that’s why. But he wasn’t afraid of what would happen to him; rather, he was afraid of what he was capable of doing…” Roberto Fariñas paused and expanded the range of his gaze to include Conde, who got ready to listen to the end of the true story, hidden for fifty years, which could finally provide Elias Kaminsky with relief. “His fear in some way was connected to Mejías, that they would put him in jail and force him to confess. Because he did know who had killed that man. And, of course, he knew it hadn’t been Pepe Manuel, as this imbecile says, because he himself helped him leave a few days before and even kept his gun … I myself gave it to him. And he also knew that it hadn’t been me, because when he left Mejías’s house, he went to get me and found me still sleeping…”

  Now it was Elias Kaminsky’s robust face that went red. He left his ponytail alone. The clarity of an ancient, repressed suspicion had begun to take shape, to be tangible. The behemoth needed to clear his throat to ask Fariñas, “My father lied to me?”

  “I don’t know … but he surely didn’t tell you the whole truth.”

  “He told you he knew who had killed Mejías?”

  “He told me that,” Fariñas confirmed. “A few days before they put me in jail, he talked to me. He felt really fucked up; he blamed himself for not being the one to snuff out that son of a bitch. And he was afraid that if he was connected with that man and put in jail, he wouldn’t be able to resist. It was a terrible time … and your father was a real coward … So I myself gave him an idea: if anything happened, we were going to blame Pepe Manuel, who had already escaped them … forever.”

  Conde listened and confirmed a simple conviction to himself: sometimes you don’t need to exhume buried truths. The epitaph read three days prior was finally making sense in his mind: “Joseph Kaminsky. Believed in the Sacred. Violated the Law. Died without feeling any remorse.”

  “The only time I wrote to your father”—Roberto Fariñas concentrated on Elias Kaminsky once again—“was to tell him that old Pepe the Purseman had died. And he asked me to do him the favor of having a tombstone made for him. He told me what I had to put on it. He wrote it in Hebrew … I can show you that letter…”

  “So why did my father tell me that whole story and not say that he knew Uncle Joseph had killed Mejías? Why didn’t he ever tell my mother?”

  “That, I don’t know, Elias. I think to save his uncle’s name even if he was fucking up his own … Or because he should have been the one to kill Mejías. I don’t know, your father was always a complicated guy. Like all Jews, no?”

  * * *

  Elias Kaminsky confessed to Conde that he didn’t know if he felt better or worse, relieved or weighed down with a bad conscience, regarding what he had come to think about his father and of the secrets and fears that the man had never confessed to him, to protect himself and others from his feelings of guilt and blame. What he did know, he told Conde, was that he wanted to finish with that plunge into the past, and even forget the painting that, at least to Daniel Kaminsky, hadn’t brought any satisfaction and had only served to twist his life again and again. To hell with it if others got rich because of it.

  “So you don’t care if the heirs of those guilty of what happened to your grandparents keep the painting or the money from the painting? Your father did care. Your uncle cared…”

  “Well, I don’t care,” he said, as if raising a white flag.

  “And it doesn’t interest you, either, to see your almost-cousin Ricardo Kaminsky?”

  When they left Roberto Fariñas’s house, Conde had invited Elias to have some beers at a ramshackle bar from which they could see the Malecón. The painter needed a break to digest the revelations, and his first reaction had been that of complete rejection. But Conde, who felt invested, was anxious to learn the remaining truths, and was taking him to the edge of the ring, letting him get fresh air and pushing him to go on. When he heard that question, Elias reacted.

  “What can that kid know, Conde?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But I’m sure he knows something. Ever since I heard Fariñas, I can feel it here, right here…” He patted the area just below his right nipple. “I have a smarting premonition: he knows something important about this whole story.”

  “What does he know?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But we could go see him this afternoon. And he’s not a kid. Remember, he’s older than you.”

  The previous night, after making the appointment with Roberto Fariñas, Conde had tracked down Ricardo Kaminsky’s telephone number in the most basic way: by looking in the telephone book. The phone book had only one person with that last name, he lived on Calle Zapotes, in Luyanó, and, of course, couldn’t be anyone but the offspring of Caridad la mulata who had gone on from being Joseph Kaminsky’s stepson to become his legally recognized son, with the Polish Jew’s name and everything. From Skinny Carlos’s house, Conde had called
, explained to him that the son of his adopted father’s nephew—yes, the son of Daniel Kaminsky, Elias—was in Cuba and was interested in seeing him. Dr. Ricardo Kaminsky, once he overcame his surprise, had agreed to a rendezvous that had been entirely unexpected for him.

  “Did you arrange a meeting?” The behemoth seemed halfway between alarmed and annoyed. Conde chalked it up to the conversation with Fariñas.

  “Yes, of course. That’s what you’re paying me for, isn’t it?”

  “Why did you think I would want to speak with him?”

  “Before, because he knew your father here in Cuba and because he was one of the last people who must have seen your uncle Joseph alive. Now, because I am convinced that he can tell you things that would interest you … Unless you really want to say the hell with all of it and get on the first flight out of here without learning everything you wanted to know.”

  Elias took a long sip of beer and sought out his handkerchief to wipe off his mouth and, incidentally, the sweat from his brow. Even in that open shack, just by the sea, the heat pulled all the moisture out of bodies. Elias shook his head, denying something only he knew the nature of. For now.

  “Did I tell you I have two kids?”

  “No. This whole time, you’ve been looking back at the past…”

  Elias nodded.

  “A boy who is fourteen and a girl who is eleven. I don’t see them as much as I’d like to now. I divorced their mother three years ago and they went to live in Oregon. She got a position at the university. Don’t act surprised: my ex became an expert on Northern European Baroque painting. At the beginning of last year, when my father started to get worse, I took my kids to Miami. We lived there for three months, until the old man died. The strange thing is, they weren’t months of mourning. Rather, of sympathetic discovery. My father was fully conscious until the end. In his final days, he even refused to be drugged, he didn’t complain, he asked that they bring him black beans … Your friend Andrés helped him a lot. The fact is that my children had only known their grandparents through the summer vacations we spent in Miami. My son was thirteen years old and was a New York kid, which means everything and nothing. No one is from New York and everyone could be from New York, I don’t know. My father then told him, whenever he could, a lot of things about his life. He taught my son about Jewish Kraków before World War Two, Nazi Berlin, the persecution that is fear, the story of his great-grandparents and the Saint Louis … Some of those things were already the subjects of movies for him, things out of Indiana Jones, and thanks to my father he was able to understand that the reality was very macabre … But he especially told him about his life in Cuba and about how and why he had decided to stop practicing Judaism and even tried to stop being Jewish. And he spoke to him a lot about freedom. Of man’s right to choose independently. Whether to believe or not in God; whether to be Jewish or anything else; whether to be honest or a bastard. He repeated the story of Judah Abravanel, which is a Jewish story to me … I think he spoke to him about the things you are and can’t stop being, and how you can never be freed of them … But do you know what he most spoke to him about?”